Title: Ralph Bunche--U.N. Mediator and Nobel Peace Laureate.

• Author: Earle, Renee M.

Text:

This year marks the 70th anniversary of the first Nobel Peace Prize presented for efforts to achieve peace in the Middle East between Israel and Arab nations in Palestine. The recipient was Ralph Bunche, an American academic and diplomat with the U.N., who received the Peace Prize in 1950 for brokering the Israeli-Arab armistice agreements in 1949. The agreements ended the official hostilities of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War between Israel and Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon and established armistice lines between Israeli and Arab nation forces that held until the 1967 Six-Day War. (This same seemingly intractable confrontation yielded two later Peace Prizes: to Anwar al-Sadat and Menachem Begin in 1978 and to Yassar Arafat, Shimon Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin in 1994.)

My introduction to Ralph Bunche came thanks to the State Department library, named for Ralph J. Bunche in 1997 in recognition of his political and humanitarian contributions to the Department of State and the United Nations, and to the world of learning.

I became an ardent admirer of Ralph Bunche for his dedication to thoughtful, patient, and persistent diplomacy--which ultimately is also effective diplomacy. Bunche was a perceptive observer of human nature and his studies in social science and colonial policy certainly stood him in good stead in his exhaustive and exhausting efforts to bring peace to Palestine in the late 1940's and in his subsequent work during 25 years with the U.N.

A rigorous academic, Bunche studied and taught political science, colonialism, and international relations at today's UCLA (summa cum laude 1927), Harvard (Ph.D. 1934), Howard, and the London School of Economics. He began his career in public service in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the organization formed during WWII to deal with domestic public information and defense information on countries where U.S. troops might serve. Subsequently the State Department requested that Bunche participate in postwar planning for colonial and dependent territories. This was followed in 1945 by a meeting with Eleanor Roosevelt and the invitation to join the U.S. delegation to the San Francisco Conference that developed the United Nations Charter. Thereafter, Bunche was part of the U.S. delegation to the meeting of the Preparatory Commission of the United Nations in London.

In 1946, the Department of State reluctantly agreed to lend Bunche to the U.N. at the request of Secretary-General Trygve Lie...